Yandex Data Leak: The Ranking Factors & The Myths We Found Part 2 Ep. 564

hi and welcome to the seo podcast unknown secrets of internet marketing my name is chris burris one of the owners of ewr digital and my name is matt bertram i think we're both seo strategists today if you are watching on the show by the way if you are watching you should definitely subscribe you should definitely click that notification bell we are wearing our ewr swag yeah you've got the hat on though like you're you're looking particularly sharp well thank you we can we got a little geeky last time we did yeah and and i mean we kind of do that pretty we do do that this time we're going to continue the geekiness continues this is part two of what is it yandex data leak the ranking factors and the myths that we found this is by dan taylor this is part two if you go back and listen to part one you'll know that i call him christmas dan and really you just have to go back and to learn why well yeah well i think that there's a lot of good information in here uh i was even digging through some more stuff earlier today yesterday uh very very excited it is kind of christmassy yeah well i mean we don't want to give the whole context because they want to go back to the previous podcast and figure out why in the world do we call this yandex seo expert christmas dan instead of you know just dan taylor go back and go back and check it out by the way if you don't know yandex is the number four i think it's the number four search engine it's probably right i would say google youtube then i would say probably yandex over being or badu like that that's got to be i do i do yeah yeah you're right you're right it is fourth yeah i think it's the number four search engine in the world and the number one search engine in russia right so and it's the number one

data leak that everyone's talking about right now right now hot off the presses i mean this happened in what january of 2022 i think that's when this uh this came out like that's pretty amazing uh he wrote this post uh january 31st so just before the just uh last month of the new yeah yeah it's like this year it's this year sorry yeah it's not last year it's this year it's like 10 days ago that he wrote this so yeah no that's yes yeah yes i don't i may not have always have the data in my head but i can go get the data and then share it and and i'm very comfortable correcting myself i was wrong um so we went in we looked through a number of the things that dan brought to light about really looking at this was basically the code was released from yandex like yeah this is everything like imagine the google algorithm was released what kind of mayhem would be caused at least you know on this podcast if nothing else no it would be a big deal it would be a huge google this is the yandex yandex and and he's gone through with a bunch of his buddies seo buddies in russia um to dig through the code and try and understand what it is go back and listen to part one we're going to jump into part two yes and the first uh line item is dwell time so 102 of the ranking factors contain the tag this is going to get a little geeky here but tg user feet search uh search dwell time so the actual important piece in this case is the dwell time and reference the device the user duration or the average page dwell time sounds pretty common so that's 102 of these ranking factors yes 39 of the factors were deprecated we're not going to list off the 102 um google he just points out that google has made it clear that it doesn't use dwell time or similar

user interaction signals as ranking factors yeah yeah yeah we have i need buzzers we have chris i need i need buzzers and sounds like i was watching some of our old podcasts yeah and you know i just i don't every episode i had a slick shit a stick a stick a stick a stick like like a hat or uh and my hair was not great a hammer we did start it we start working together quite some time ago um that is that is the stress of of the world uh your money your life that's what we're going to get into here yeah next is your money your life um because we can kind of agree that google does use uh user interaction i i user interactions dwell time i mean in analytics is really important i mean there's other factors involved on like looking at dwell time because it gives you so much information what is someone doing on the page where are they going are they coming back to that page how many times but there's so much information i would even say i would gander to say that on page interactions are more important than any other ranking factor uh now you know google continues to spin the wheel on uh on waitings but i would say one of the most recent waitings it was all on page all of it so so there's there's almost no way that dwell time was not part of it yeah okay so yeah no i i think that's very true and we actually have some kind of uh internal data that suggests that it will that dwell time is important that is important and even some other seo experts out there kind of understand that to be true yeah um why myl your money your life is a concept well known within within google uh and it's not a new concept in yandex uh there are specific ranking factors for medical legal financial content that exists this was notably revealed in 2019 at the yandex webmaster

conference when it was announced the proxima search quality metric um so no surprise there so this might be talked about later but i want to bring it up now because i think it's super valuable before i forget yeah so one of the big things your money your life this is going back to the google eat right like expertise authoritativeness and trust but one of the big things is when you're publishing data right right um yandex is looking at uh when it was published oh okay yeah okay and so there's a lot of seo people out there that sometimes obfuscate what like when that was published like when that article is published or even maybe you're not intentionally trying to do it but like you're publishing a blog and it doesn't say who it's by and it doesn't say when it was published and that is app like like the uh the opposite of eat well yes but but also the length of time the length of time that the age the age of the domain right and google says all that we don't look at that they they do yeah and and so um these are important things when you're publishing a blog like i was looking at a lot of different blogs i'm working in the oil and gas space pretty heavily and um there's best practices that need to be followed that you know if you don't know what you're doing you could be detrimentally hurting your site and not only that um people that are launching new websites okay like i saw a lot of really nice big expensive websites that people have launched and they had they did not have an seo consultant on board okay they had a designer they had it looked pretty but what it was designer and a developer not an seo yeah you need it you need an seo like there's best practices even in house that um you can have your team follow like uploading images compressing them before you do that but there's a

lot of these things that are so simple and especially anything in your money your life to kind of bring it back if you do it wrong you will get dinged like there's other areas that oh it's not that big a deal in your money your life like if you're writing something about legal or financial or something like that they're looking at okay who is that person saying this right is it accurate and um are there other trust indicators involved in that and you might not be intentionally doing it and you might be hurting yourself is what i'm saying and in this category it's extra important to know what you're doing so eat is important that's that's expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness the opposite would be negative eat would that be neat i don't know where we're going but all i know is in in your money your life like if you're doing something in that you need to be consulting an seo agent if you don't know exactly what you're doing the information is out there so you know you can go do it yourself just make sure you do it right or find some of that can that's my point all right next on this yandex data leak is metrica data usage did you know what metrica was before yeah this is why we do this because i learn stuff new all the time so really metrica is the equivalent of google analytics okay right so six of the ranking factors relate to the usage of metrica data for the purposes of ranking however one of them is tagged as deprecated i'm going to list those six right here and i'll point out which one was deprecated so some of the metrica data that is used is the number of similar visitors from the yandex bar right so you've got a yandex bar that's kind of like the bar that sits atop of your of your browser and so it's kind of comparing how many similar visitors are coming from the yandex bar the average

time spent on urls from those similar visitors the core audience of pages on which there is metrica is a metrica counter and it says that one is deprecated the average time a user spends on a host when accessed externally and that means from a non-search site or from from a specific url so let's talk about that a little bit more so the average time a user spends on a host site when accessed externally from another non-search site from a specific url so is that that's like a backlink is that then they follow the referral click and how long did they how long did they stay yeah what was their what was their dwell time um next is average depth and this is the number of hits within the host of a user's stay on the host when accessed externally again from a backlink um or from a particular url and then whether or not the domain has metrica installed um so that makes a difference yeah so if you don't use their analytics they ding you well they're not saying they ding you they're just saying it's a factor okay maybe maybe christmas dan is not saying that he they ding you but it is a factor i think we can so so i guess in this next part says unlike google analytics there's a number of reports focused on user loyalty combined site engagement metrics with return frequency duration between visits and source of visit for example i can see a report in one click to break down the individual site visitors okay so i i didn't know if he was like making an extra point to install metrica or not so uh i think it should be yeah installed um he does point out that metrica comes out of the box with heat map tools and user session recording um that would be kind of cool that would be awesome to have to have that all together because i bet metrica pulls that data into their database and that's why they need it

on there so they don't have to work their other um like machine learning so hard now to compare this with google analytics right with google analytics there is an argument that google doesn't use uaga4 data right so that's the google analytics data that it's connecting uh collecting so that it can give you reports for ranking purposes because of how easy it is to modify or break the tracking code i'm not sure i believe that i've always had this suspicion and my intuition says google has access to all this data and can whitewash the data so it doesn't actually you know reveal information about a particular url and then they can say well when we did our xyz search result what was the activity so it's not an active component it's a qaqc of the search engine result interesting because one of the big things that i've been looking at is um you know google is obfuscating i can't even say that right now but basically google's hiding even more like you remember you could buy you could see what people are doing but you had to pay for it in google adwords yeah well now you know so now i was like referring back to search console right because that's like anybody that comes to the website uh even if the pixel doesn't fire to see that data yeah well i know that i've been on different devices searching for stuff to kind of you know eyeball check some things out and and i've been doing some kind of weird searches and they're not showing up so like i know i'm doing these searches i know i'm going to that website and it's not showing up in google analytics and it's not showing up in search console so i always thought search console was the end-all be-all like that was all the data that was coming to the website and then even like we have like rank math installed on our our our website and that data is different too so so i'm like they're

grabbing data off the website when that pixel fires google analytics data is different and then search console is different third-party tools are different like there's no single sort of truth like and you're not getting all the data if you could install metrica if it's got an english interface that would be super interesting you know and it would come with the um the heat map right out of the box i mean that's i wonder i wonder about that i wonder if it can read data from other search engines or just index oh interesting so what is the but the reality is is you know the pixel that is on that that is google analytics that is on your site is sure i i would think i think just like rank what was the tool you just mentioned rank math right rank math yeah so like i think that that would be a way to kind of double check interesting interesting all right we can keep going all right number well we don't have numbers impact of traffic on rankings uh so direct traffic and paid traffic that's of course buying ads via yandex direct can impact organic search performance so here are things that they take into consideration according to the assessment of the algorithm that was you know yeah late percent share of direct visits among all incoming traffic yes green traffic share that is direct direct visits on desktop green traffic share direct visits on mobile so that i would say that ratio that's some search traffic transitions from search engines to the site so how many of those are happening share of visits to the site not by links so this is set by hand or from bookmarks what i don't know is if what's the difference between direct visits and set by hand i would have to think nothing but from bookmarks could be something and i'm not sure that it would know those unless you've got the yandex toolbar well okay a couple things one is i know on desktop and

mobile you can have different rankings based on load time yep what gets loaded like they're looked at independently to a certain degree and then um going to the bookmarks by hand to answer your question the bookmark is is is a link click right it's a link click by hand means probably typing it in well yeah so i would say that the first one direct visits is set by hand those are kind of the same thing now does a bookmark from a chrome browser or any browser show up as the browser being the referral source maybe it does that i've never i've never tried to dig into that so that's how they would know it's a bookmark versus a you know standard backlink or a search engine click or being typed in by hand uh so next the number of unique visitors so that's important and i think this is all the ratios it's it's not any one thing it's how they compare to others and then share of traffic from search engines so it's going to look at the balance of all of those the next one is news factors there are a number of factors related to news including two that mention yandex news directly now interesting yandex news is kind of the equivalent of google news but it was sold to the russian social network von kontakt uh in i was wondering i i didn't know what it was going to be and i want to contact uh in august of 2022 along with another uh yandex product called zen oh i could have said that one for you go zen so it's not clear matt i'll let you handle this so it's not clear if these factors related to a product no longer owned or operated by yandex or to how news websites are ranked in regular search so the they basically you know yandex news was mentioned maybe it's deprecated um and maybe it continues to have importance even though yandex no longer owns the yandex news okay now we're going

to talk about backlink importance right we know how important this is uh in the google sphere so yandex has similar algorithms to combat link manipulation as google and and has since the nepot filter of 2005. i love all these names and they're new to me like it's like a whole new world that's interesting that's because that's direct i like it parallel yeah uh from review reviewing the backlink ranking factors we can assume that the best practices for building links for yandex seo would be the following build links with a more natural frequency and varying amounts we were actually just talking about this before before the podcast build links with branded anchor texts as well as commercial keywords so commercial anchor keyword anchor text um do you know what that means yeah okay well i want to explain it to people yeah like so i wanted to go into more detail yeah you want me to you want me to wing it i can i can wing it no like i wanted to talk about it because i thought it was valuable okay go sorry i like you're like getting into this well so i think that when you're building backlinks um when and and certainly on page or other websites that you can control you have a lot uh more uh ability to do this versus um submitting to publishers um that sort of thing uh but branded is like the name of your company yeah um so you want to have like branded just branded yeah branded plus commercial keywords like okay ewr digital marketing agency or seo services but ewr digital seo services yeah right you want you want a combination mix there uh and then branded searches and then you can even have um searches with location based in it or locations in like the paragraph and so they're unbranded and then and then complete unbranded you could have click here website like things like that so that's that and then you can have naked yeah that's almost naked right because it's

just click here well the i would i would have put naked in the category of just the url like oh just the url just the url yeah so so so yeah so having like different varying amounts and um i have some suspicions on what the varying amounts they're looking for because also if you have if it's weighted wrong or it's weighted unnaturally yeah it's very easy to see yep right and so um but i think that understanding that mix is important so all right go back into it so yeah so branded anchor text you talked about that like the brand commercial keywords are going to be like um digital marketing agency or seo services or you know plumbing services now if buying links avoid buying links from websites that have mixed topics so you want to make sure you're in the yandex sphere this is also true in google that that if you've got a website that's entirely that you want to link from that you want to uh do a guest post on and and you want to buy a link in this case because it's a purchase link then make sure that there are topics specific to what you're what you're doing and that that that should be sponsored like if you're if you're getting that but what i would tell you too is um why is mixed topics bad okay and the reason mixed topics bad is because you're trying to connect with other sites that are similar to yours to get some more type of traffic it's like really the google is looking for kind of everyone linking hands with other experts and other experts linking to them so if you're linking to like a random all news site okay it's going to have varying traffic it's going to have varying links it's going to be very confusing on mixed signals so it's it's really like you're looking for something more homogeneous and and uh so okay we can keep going all right here is a list of link related factors

that can be considered affirmations of best practices again this came out of the analysis the age of the backlink is a factor link relevance based on topics yes factor uh backlinks built from home pages carry more weight than internal pages yep uh links from the top 100 websites by page rank can impact rankings significantly yes uh link relevance based on the quality of each link yes link relevance taking into account the quality of each link and the topic of each link so both those combined and then link relevance taking into account the non-commercial nature of each link percentage of inbound links with query keywords percentage of query words in links so up and and it can count uh including a synonym synonym uh the links containing all the words of the query again synonym uh included dispersion of the number of query words in the links yeah these are all stuff that we yeah that we kind of know um and and just make make really good sense there are some link related factors that are additional considerations including planning monitoring and analyzing backlinks so the ratio of good versus backlinks on a website you want to understand and and measure that and and and take it into consideration the frequency of links to the site and then finally the number of incoming seo trash links between hosts i'm pretty sure they didn't say trash links between hosts i mean google just did two spam updates that really affected it but a lot of times uh seos would create just a ton of low quality links that had no real value just to to get anchor text in there or to get links but there's factors on referral traffic uh quality of the pages what the other links are like all all these other factors apply it's basically category of good and bad like high quality links and again focus on generating the high quality links because one of those is worth hundreds or maybe a hundred or like the ratio is going to vary

on on the quality of that link on what it is versus something else and instead of like go after quantity not quality quality not quantity yeah yeah it's gonna it's gonna have exponential exponential value um the link spam calculator has around 80 active factors that are taken into consideration this does create the question as to how well yandex is able to recognize negative seo attacks right so that's when you just buy a bunch of spammy links and point them to a website that can be a negative seo and that has been something that i've had to deal with in the past and and and what what is interesting is that ratio if you have too many spammy links to good links it puts this kind of damper effect on your rankings and and so really be a purist on really high quality links of of what you're looking for and now you know there's a whole nother debate here on if you can even say hey i don't want to claim these links yeah um with google but that's not for this this conversation yeah all right let's talk about yandex penalties there are two ranking factors both of them are deprecated and pessimization refers to reducing page rank to zero and aligns with the expectations of severe yandex penalties page rank to zero that makes sense and then spam karma also aligns with the assumption made around yandex penalizing hosts and individuals as well as individual domains meaning like it's karma you're in the wrong neighborhood we talk about make sure that the server you're on you actually have some idea about what other domains are on there because if you're on a server loaded with a bunch of spam negative value uh domains then that can have an impact uh and yandex it's called spam karma which is kind of a cool name cool all right and then i think this is finally is this finally i think this is finally nope there's two more um on page advertising it is assumed that

a high ratio of adverts advertisements to visible screen it was a negative factor much like how google takes umbrage if advertisements obfuscate the page they used your word you've been using that word the whole day uh the page's main content or are obtrusive uh so we know this sits in google it also sits in yandex it's a bad customer experience yep proxima update also took into consideration the ratio of useful and advertising content on a page yeah can we apply any yandex learnings to google it's kind of why we're doing this right um there are tens of engineers have worked for both companies like that's kind of cool i didn't know that um because of this we can infer that some of these master builders and engineers will have built things in a similar faction fashion although you know obviously not direct copies so yeah there's learnings that oh i'm sure confirmations that we can bring across what are russian seo pros saying about this leak and really in the forums uh christmas dan jumped in and was like hey what are these common questions and and i'm just going to throw them out here right yep webmasters asking for insights into recent filters such as mimicry and the updated pf filter go back to the previous podcast yes because we discussed the pf filter um the age and relevance of some of the factors due to the author's names no longer being at yandex or mentions of long retired yandex products right if yandex no longer owns yandex news is that if it's in the data week how old is the data so i think that's fair very fair the main interesting learnings are around the use of metrica data and information related to the crawler and indexer uh so i think yes that would be like how exciting and interesting would it be that you know the google algorithm gets thrown out there and like oh chris was wrong the whole time google was actually incorporating uh google analytics data into their um

serp predictions right from the beginning and then finally a debate around ics scoring in yandex and whether or not yandex may provide traffic to a site and influence to its own factors by doing so and i thought this was really interesting to kind of wrap this up there's a long-standing sentiment in the russian seo community that yandex oftentimes favors its own products and services and search results ahead of other websites so does google we've had that feeling for sure um why the and the question is why does yandex bother when it just nails its services to the top of the page anyway so they're they're on the top of the page like google maps is up there google youtube yes you do but if people are searching for something else like yeah well i think it makes sense because you're you're not coming to every page and looking at the links that are always there right you're going to come to the page and you're going to look at the links because this is a relevant search result and if yandex wants to show their stuff they're going to show their stuff in google we would call these search engine page features like google hotels um would right so they're okay so it's not just at the top of the search it's actually in the top of the ranking yeah so yeah it's there like for sure you want to on the page as many times as possible we've definitely had that conversation and then finally i thought this was important i mean interesting i don't know how important it is in october of 2022 kasir a russian ticket portal so like ticket master claimed 328 rubles i think it's of compensation from yandex due to lost revenue because yandex pushed them down right so when yandex lots it's launched it's 300 000 though i think it was uh 328 million million which is okay 4.5 million u.s okay okay that's the penalty yeah um because you know imagine ticket masters are sitting there you

lost a bunch of money yeah google comes out with the ticketing thing and pushes ticket master down um 4.5 million well you know ticket masters like website sucks yeah yeah so i mean it should get pushed down if that's the analogy here yeah yeah that's a that's a no-brainer hey you know what i did read a review so i'm going to save it for next time okay i think we should uh i think we should just launch on out of here all right let's do it if you i mean we gotta we gotta end with this if you would like to grow your business with the largest simplest marketing tool on the planet the internet go to ewr digital for increased revenue in your business uh once you are on ewr digital.com uh click the free consultation button yes schedule like how convenient this is schedule a time that works for you right there yeah just scroll down on the page pick a time that works for you uh we'll have one of our consultants ready to go and um look forward to speaking with you hopefully got value in this please leave us a review you can check us out on best seo podcasts on any platform yep uh we appreciate uh all the support all the follows all the likes all the anything bills all of it please do it until the next podcast my name is chris burris my name is matt bertram bye bye for now